Google files your founder stories as company news, so about half the searches it shows you for are people looking up a company, not selling one.

The short version

• 1
  Your stories are titled like company news, so Google shows them to people following the company. 221 of your 277 story titles read as a deal announcement. Your Seobility story was shown 809 times in four days, nearly always to someone shopping for an SEO tool, and got 0 visits.
• 2
  Your guides already send readers to your offers. Your stories don't. The broker fees guide links to your advisor match three times. Stories brought 119 of your 185 visits from Google, and nothing in them points to a valuation or an advisor.
• 3
  The answer a seller wants is locked in a PDF. "What do SaaS businesses sell for?" is answered in your SaaS Deals Report, behind an email form. Your SaaS stories page, the natural public home for it, is titled "SaaS Deals Archives" and has no introduction.
• 4
  56 seller questions are close. You're on page two or three for them, across 17 guides and 2 offer pages. Better titles and links from your stories are how those move.
• 5
  Phones are 0.3 seconds over Google's speed line. Most of the wait is your server rebuilding pages it could keep ready. One message to WP Engine and a short brief for your developer cover it.
• 6
  Start by tagging each lead with the page it came from. Without that, nobody can tell whether a story ever produced a valuation request.

Every step carries a tag. You can do this steps come with a prompt to paste into ChatGPT or Claude, or plain steps in WordPress. Your developer steps come with a brief to send as written. We draft, you approve and We do this are ours. All the fixes, in the order to do them, are collected near the end.

About half the searches you appear for are someone looking up a company

Company and people's names are the biggest group by far, whichever way we measure: what people typed, from your own Search Console, or every search Google lists you for, from the ranking database. Seller questions are about a sixth of the first and a twelfth of the second.

Your Seobility story shows it on one page. Google showed it more than any other story over those four days, and nearly every search we can see behind it was someone shopping for an SEO tool.

Mock-up built from the page's real title and web address (open the story). Figures: Search Console, 21 to 24 September 2026.

Your headline is written for a founder. The title Google shows is written for someone following the company. The same split runs across the site: Backlinko (522 times shown, 0 visits, people searching "brian dean") and TMZ ("harvey levin net worth", 6,600 searches a month) work the same way.

What your founders say they needed, against what your pages show Google

Your About page and your offer pages describe the reader clearly, in your words and your clients'. The left column quotes them. The right column is what a founder who searches finds today.

Screenshots of the live pages, 25 September 2026. Your strategy call now goes through The Exit Playbook course, so the seller box offers the two free routes: the valuation and the advisor match, which you describe as a fit for businesses with $300K to $25M in revenue.

It's the titles and a missing page, not the stories themselves

Where Google shows you, and where it sends people

Your guides and your stories split Google's attention almost evenly. Your four offer pages barely register.

Where your stories send readers

We read six stories across SaaS, media, agency, services, e-commerce and community. Inside the article text they link to your own site 7 times, 6 of them to guides, and two of the six have no links at all. The "More Stories You Might Like" block underneath adds 14 links to other stories and 4 to reports. Nothing in either place goes to an offer.

Your guides are different. The broker fees guide links to the advisor match three times and the business brokers guide twice. The SDE guide links to your free valuation. The pattern exists; it just stops at the guides.

Two smaller mix-ups you can live with

• Your name contains "acquired". Your podcast page ranks 10th for "acquired podcast" (14,800 searches a month), which is Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal's show. Those listeners won't become sellers. Not worth chasing.
• "SDE" is also a software job title. Your SDE guide is the page Google shows most on the whole site (4,327 times, 6 visits). On "sde means", 6 of the 8 results Google shows are about the job. A small title change helps the searchers who are sellers. Rewriting the page wouldn't.

Sellers already find you on pages two and three

Google lists one of your guides or offer pages for 217 searches about selling or buying a business or its assets. Most sit too deep to be seen. The 56 on pages two and three are the ones to move, because they're close and they're specific.

Specific questions are where you win. "How to sell my business without a broker" puts you second, right after Reddit, and the AI answer Google puts at the top of that page cites your guide. All three seller searches we checked opened with an AI answer like that.

The broad searches are a different fight. "How to sell a business" (1,300 a month) has you on page five or deeper, behind Axial, BizBuySell and Forbes. We'd leave it for now.

Six pages to retitle first, and the pattern for the rest

Each change below touches only the title Google shows, the Yoast "SEO title" field. Your on-page headline and web address stay as they are. Your SEOJet story already does this well: "He built SEOJet to $360K revenue, then sold for 7 figures".

1. Seobility/saas/seobility-acquired-by-saas-group/

Shown 809 times in four days, 0 visits. 30 of the 37 searches we can see behind it were someone comparing SEO tools ("seobility pricing", "alternatives").

Title in GoogleSeobility acquired by saas.group to expand its portfolio of brandsHow a bootstrapped SEO software company sold for mid-7 figures

Headline on pageUnchanged: "This founder sold to strengthen his company's position in a competitive SEO tools market"

Web addressUnchanged

I run They Got Acquired, a site about founders who sold their businesses. I have a downloadable report, "[REPORT NAME]", covering [NUMBER] [TYPE, e.g. SaaS] businesses that sold. I want a public page that answers what a founder types into Google: "What do [TYPE] businesses sell for, and who buys them?" The full report stays a free download behind an email form. This page gives away the headline answers.

Using ONLY the report text I paste below, write:
1. A title under 60 characters that answers the question.
2. An opening of 150 to 250 words that answers the question in its first two sentences, using 3 to 5 facts from the report (deal size range, the kinds of buyers, common reasons founders sold). Quote numbers exactly as the report states them. If the report doesn't give a number, don't estimate one.
3. A table with one row per deal: business, what it did, buyer, price or range if public, and [STORY LINK] as a placeholder.
4. Two closing lines: one inviting the reader to download the full report, one offering a free valuation.

Plain, warm, direct English. No dashes between clauses. No hype.

Report text:
[paste here]

Four more stories, same pattern

The 20 stories Google shows most

These 20 were shown 5,754 times in four days and got 29 visits. Retitle them first, then the rest as you publish or update. Lead each title with the type of business, the size or price, and the lesson. Put the company name after that, or leave it out.

You are helping me rewrite the Google titles of founder stories on They Got Acquired (theygotacquired.com), a site about founders who sold their businesses. The readers I want from Google are founders thinking about selling a business in the next year or two, and buyers looking for founder-led businesses.

For each story below I'll give you the web address, the current title, the headline on the page, and the first three paragraphs.

Write a new title for each one. Rules:
1. Lead with what a founder thinking of selling would care about: the type of business, its size or sale price, and the lesson. Put the company name after that, or leave it out if it doesn't fit.
2. 60 characters or fewer. Count them.
3. Use only facts in the text I paste. No invented numbers. No hype words.
4. No dashes between clauses. Use a colon or rewrite the sentence.
5. It can be shorter and plainer than the on-page headline. Don't copy the headline word for word.

Example of the pattern:
Current: Seobility acquired by saas.group to expand its portfolio of brands
New: How a bootstrapped SEO software company sold for mid-7 figures

Return a table: web address | current title | new title | character count.

Stories:
[paste each story here]

One story, fixed: what a seller would see

This is the Seobility story with the changes in this audit applied. The headline, subtitle, byline and deal box are the real ones. The grey lines stand in for the story text, which doesn't change.

• 1
  The title Google shows leads with the seller lesson. The web address, headline and subtitle stay as they are.
• 2
  A second button in the deal box. Today its only button is "Join our Newsletter". A reader who has just seen "Price: Mid-7 figures" is the one most likely to wonder about their own number.
• 3
  A seller box after the fourth paragraph, styled like the navy box in your broker fees guide. "See SaaS deals" goes to the SaaS stories page once it carries the report numbers; "Get a free valuation" goes to your valuation page. The advisor match line catches the founder who's already decided to sell.
• 4
  The same box again at the end, above the newsletter signup and More Stories You Might Like. One template change puts both boxes on every story, with the business type filled in from the story's category.

Our WordPress site theygotacquired.com uses a custom theme and Yoast SEO. Please add a small box to the single-post template for exit stories (posts in the business-type categories such as SaaS, Media, Services, E-commerce, Agency, Community, Marketplace). Show it after the fourth paragraph and again at the end of the story, just above the "Want more stories like this?" newsletter box.

The box reads:
Heading: "Thinking about selling your [category] business?"
Text: "See what [category] businesses like this one sold for, then get a free estimate of what yours could sell for."
Buttons: "See [category] deals" linking to that category's page, and "Get a free valuation" linking to /business-valuation/.
Small line under the buttons: "Want help choosing an advisor? We'll match you, for free." linking to /recommend-ma-advisor/.

- Take the category from the post's Yoast primary category, or the first category if none is set.
- Style it like the existing "Need help choosing an M&A advisor?" box on /resources/how-much-do-brokers-charge/ (navy background, white heading, blue button).
- Use real <a href> links (no JavaScript click handlers) so Google can follow them.
- Do not show the box on posts in the Resources category.

Also, in the "Here's the deal" box on each story, add a second button under "Join our Newsletter": "Get a free valuation", linking to /business-valuation/.

Test on /saas/seobility-acquired-by-saas-group/, /saas/seojet-acquired/ and /content/charlotte-agenda-acquired-by-axios/ before it goes live on every story.

On phones your pages miss Google's speed line by 0.3 seconds, mostly while the server builds the page

Google checks how long real Chrome visitors wait for the main content of a page, and draws its line at 2.5 seconds for the slowest quarter of visits. On phones you're at 2.8 seconds, so phones fail the check. On computers you're at 1.9 seconds and pass. Nick measured 3.1 seconds on phones on 18 September; the latest 28 days are a little better and still over the line.

Everything else Google checks passes on both: taps get a quick response, and nothing jumps around while the page loads.

Most of the wait is the server building the page

For that same slowest quarter of phone visits, the server takes 1.8 seconds to send its first reply, before the phone can draw anything. Your host, WP Engine, keeps a ready-made copy of each page for 10 minutes. After that, the next visitor waits while WordPress builds the page again. We fetched five stories at random: all five had expired, and each took about a second to arrive. Fetched again straight after, each came back in under a tenth of a second.

Hi, I run theygotacquired.com on WP Engine.

Our pages are sent with Cache-Control: max-age=600, so the cached copy of each page expires after 10 minutes. The site is mostly articles that change rarely, and when we tested five stories at random all five had expired. Each took 0.9 to 1.4 seconds for the server to answer, against under 0.1 seconds once cached.

Could you lengthen the page cache time for this site, for example to 24 hours? We'd still like a page's cache to clear automatically when we publish or update it. If this is a setting I can change myself in the User Portal, please point me to it.

Thank you.

Then the phone waits for fonts, and downloads an icon library

Before a phone draws the page it has to fetch font instructions from two services, Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts. The Adobe ones come as a chain of three files, each waiting for the one before. Your theme's scripts also load at the top of the page. Google's test tool estimates that loading these differently would save 2 to 3 seconds on its simulated slow phone.

The biggest single download is an icon library, Font Awesome, at 437 KB. That's more than twice your own site's files on the SDE guide (202 KB). It draws five kinds of icon: a down arrow, the X and LinkedIn logos, and plus and minus signs. It loads after the page appears, so it isn't what fails the check, but a slow phone spends about a second processing it.

Lighthouse, the test behind PageSpeed Insights, scores out of 100 on a simulated slow phone and connection, so its times run well above what real visitors see (8.7 seconds in the test against 2.8 for real phone visits). Use it to compare before and after, not as the verdict.

Site: theygotacquired.com (WordPress, custom theme "tga", WP Rocket, WP Engine).

The problem: real phone visits fail Google's Core Web Vitals check. Largest Contentful Paint is 2.8 s at the 75th percentile against the 2.5 s threshold (Chrome UX Report, origin, 27 Aug to 23 Sep 2026). Desktop passes at 1.9 s. INP and CLS are fine. Phone TTFB is 1.8 s at p75; the page cache part of that is going to WP Engine support separately.

1. Fonts. The theme's style.css @imports Adobe Fonts (use.typekit.net/azz7ubv.css, which chains to p.typekit.net and then the font files) and Google Fonts (Libre Baskerville). Because they are @imports, the browser can't start on them until style.css has arrived. Move both to <link> tags in the <head> and add preconnect hints for use.typekit.net, p.typekit.net, fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com. Whether the site needs both font services is Alexis's design call.

2. Scripts in the head. jquery, jquery-migrate, bootstrap.min.js, jquery.matchHeight.js and infinite-scroll.min.js load in the <head> without defer. Move them to the footer or defer them, then test the menu, the story grid and infinite scroll.

3. Font Awesome. The site loads the full Font Awesome 5 JavaScript kit (use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.15.4/js/all.js, 437 KB compressed, about 1.0 to 1.3 s of script time on Lighthouse's simulated phone) to draw five icons: fa-chevron-down, fa-twitter, fa-linkedin-in, fa-plus and fa-minus. Replace them with inline SVGs and remove the script.

4. WP Rocket. "Remove Unused CSS" and "Delay JavaScript execution" are both off. bootstrap.min.css is 23.6 KB with 22.8 KB unused on the SDE guide. Try both settings, exclude anything that breaks, and test the Kit and SparkLoop signup forms afterwards.

Before and after: run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage and on /resources/sde-sellers-discretionary-earnings-explained/. Lighthouse shows the change straight away; Google's real-visitor figure takes 28 days to catch up.

All fixes, in the order to do them

Eleven steps in three groups. Each links back to the section that explains it.

First: measure, and change what Google reads

1. Your developer Tag every lead with the page it started on and where the visitor came from.What we'll measure
2. You can do this Retitle the 20 stories Google shows most, starting with Seobility and Charlotte Agenda.Pages to retitle
3. You can do this Three changes in Yoast: the SDE and podcast titles, and who publishes the site.SDE guide
   Show the steps

   Your homepage currently describes itself to Google as a web page and a website, with no publisher, logo or social profiles attached. The third change tells Google the site belongs to a company.

   1. Open the SDE guide and the podcast page and paste the new titles into the Yoast "SEO title" field.
   2. Go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Site representation. Choose Organization, enter the name They Got Acquired, and upload your logo.
   3. On the same screen, under Other profiles, add https://www.linkedin.com/company/they-got-acquired/ and https://twitter.com/TheyGotAcquired. Save.

Next: give every story a route to your offers

1. Your developer Add the seller box to every story, twice, and a valuation button in the deal box.Demo
2. You can do this Put your offers and best guides in the footer, which is on all 520 pages.In their words
   Show the links and the steps

   Nick suggested a heavier footer in his 18 September review, and you mentioned it's in progress. Today it has six links: About, Privacy Policy, Press, Reports, Contact and For AI. What we'd add:

   • Free business valuation
   • Find an M&A advisor
   • The Exit Playbook course
   • First Look
   • Sale multiples by industry
   • SDE explained
   • What brokers charge
   • Selling without a broker
   • SaaS deals
   • Media deals

   1. In WordPress, go to Appearance → Menus and pick "Footer Menu" from the dropdown.
   2. Add each page from the Pages box, or as a Custom Link with the web address above. Write the link text the way a seller would say it.
   3. Save Menu, then look at a story on your phone. If the theme squeezes everything into one long row, ask your developer to split the footer into two or three columns (offers, guides, deals).

   If the "without a broker" address changes in the housekeeping step, update this link at the same time.

3. We draft, you approve Turn the SaaS, media, agency and e-commerce pages into public answers with your report's headline numbers.Your SaaS stories page
4. We do this Link stories to the guides on pages two and three, using the searcher's own words ("business broker fees", "strategic vs financial buyer"), working from the 56 searches and the 17 guides behind them.Sellers on pages two and three
5. We draft, you approve Point buyers to First Look from your firms-that-buy-SaaS guide, and fold the two overlapping broker how-to guides into your main broker guide so one page carries the rankings.In their words

After that: phone speed and housekeeping

1. You can do this Send WP Engine the message asking them to keep your pages ready for longer.Phone speed
2. Your developer Load the fonts without holding up the page, defer the scripts, and replace the icon library.Phone speed
3. We do this Housekeeping, five small fixes.Needs your WordPress access
   • Link the byline to your team bio pages. Google hasn't picked up 21 of your 23 bios, because articles link only to the separate author pages.
   • Link to the 6 reports Google hasn't picked up, and merge the three SaaS report pages and the two custom-report pages that repeat each other.
   • Clean the list of pages you ask Google to read: it includes thank-you pages, a survey, an easter egg and 4 pages that redirect.
   • Fix three small technical slips: a misplaced line in robots.txt (the file that tells search engines what to read), the www version of your address sending people to the insecure http version instead of https, and the "how-to-a-sell-business" typo in one web address (with a redirect).
   • Write the 65 missing page descriptions, most of them on author, category and team pages.

What we'll measure, starting from today

The first four weeks of Search Console data end on 18 October, so that's the first baseline. We check monthly after that, with reviews at six months (April 2027) and twelve months (October 2027). We aren't promising where you'll rank: Google decides that. We'll report whether each number moved.

The first row depends on step 1. Your forms don't record where a lead started, so today nobody can tell whether a story ever sent a valuation request.

On theygotacquired.com we have three offer forms:
- free valuation (/business-valuation/)
- advisor match (/recommend-ma-advisor/)
- First Look (/firstlook/)
(Strategy calls now go through The Exit Playbook course at playbook.theygotacquired.com. If the course checkout accepts hidden fields, add them there too.)

For each form, add two hidden fields that fill themselves:
1. landing_page: the first page on our site the visitor saw in this visit. Save it in sessionStorage on the first page load and read it when the form loads.
2. referrer: document.referrer, captured on that same first page (for example google.com, a newsletter, or empty for direct).

Pass both fields into the form tool so every lead record shows them. Do not collect anything else about the visitor.

Test: open a story page from a Google search, click through to the valuation form, submit a test lead, and confirm both fields arrived.

Four things that look tempting and aren't worth it yet

• Chasing company-name, celebrity or "Acquired podcast" searches. They bring the wrong reader.
• Rewriting the SDE guide. Many of those searches are people looking for a software job. The title change is enough.
• Targeting "how to sell a business". You're on page five or deeper, behind Axial, BizBuySell and Forbes. Revisit once the steps above are live.
• A new theme or a rebuild for speed. Phones are 0.3 seconds over Google's line, and the causes are specific: the page cache, the font loading and one icon library. The steps above deal with each.

Four things we need from you

1. A WordPress Application Password for a user we can work as. Your security plugin blocks automated edits without one. (Users → Profile → Application Passwords.)
2. Lead counts for each offer form over the last 12 months, if your form tool keeps them. That gives the benchmark a starting line.
3. Your OK to put headline numbers from the reports on public pages (step 6). The full reports stay gated.
4. Older Search Console history, if you have it. The account we can see starts on 21 September. If an older one exists for the site, add ash@nickgray.net to it and we'll rerun this with 16 months of data.

Who does what: yourselves, or with us

Everything in this audit can be done without us: each step has a prompt, a brief or plain WordPress steps. The right-hand column is what changes if you hand a step to us.